The Sociologist's Duty
We believe that a structural view of society can see things as they are. We have an obligation to share that with upcoming students.
In a previous post about vibes versus bullshit, I talked a lot about how AI is making the process of obtaining knowledge that is both trustworthy and useful to critical inquiry is becoming more difficult. Sources of vetted information are paywalled, with no unified way of accessing them. Academic publishing is an oligopoly that is simply beyond the reach of people who do not have institutional access to journal databases; the top five publishers were responsible for over half of published peer-reviewed articles in 2013.1 ChatGPT has become a serious concern among professors, an entire additional burden on faculty is how to make sure people are assessed on the content of a class and building essential skills. While at the community college many curricula have switched to in-class assignments and other things in which LLMs are not available, this runs into a direct conflict with higher study- that is, being able to synthesize research into original arguments.
There is the question of what point the research paper has. I would say that learning to write detailed papers was the single biggest help in improving my analysis and critical thinkings kills. Actually getting into how one gains an insight into structural factors in social and political life requires going beyond textbooks and the memorization of information.
Pedagogy can be a neglected part of the academic system. In the quest for tenure, teaching skills are not hugely useful unless one finds themselves in a “teacher’s college.” This may mean a community college, but many undergrad-only liberal arts colleges do have a focus on effective teaching rather than professors spending so much time on obtaining grants and trying to get papers published.
I believe in sociology and as C. Wright Mills said, the promise that if we link our biography and history, we will gain unique insight. The question is how we gain insight in a system where authentic information is more and more inaccessible- only available to those with substantial financial resources, or are students with database access, which is just a different way of phrasing that. We need to guide those who are interested in the sociological lens to actual substantial content, and understand that traditional guides on doing effective research are being undermined. While SEO garbage has always made searching for sources difficult (as well as many “study tool” sites which inaccurately summarize many key texts and concepts), the AI hallucinations are much more concerning because SEO garbage is fairly easy to pick out, having no substance. AI creates an illusion of analysis. But we see that it often is a mirage, it tells us what we want to here.
We don’t need to be flattered by a large language model, we need sound analysis and empirical study. So when going beyond the syllabus and the readings from textbooks, standalone books, and journal articles, a reevaluation is required. I believe in students gaining the ability to independently doing sociological work out in the world- if we do not teach the new generation how to think on their own, what are we doing in the instruction of the discipline?
This is not a solution, but more a way for sociologists, both within academia and not, to have a dialogue on how to make studying sociology worth the tuition costs and time spent. I have often been told my bachelor’s and master’s in sociology are “useless” or in some way about restating the obvious in as much jargon as possible. In my experience that’s not the case, but you can definitely get an education in sociology that is functionally useless. Some students do not want to learn, they are just there for the credential. But I would hope that we imbue some sort of useful skills out in the world.
In order to be activists, to work towards social change, we need to understand the world at a deeper level than popular media and the proclamations of politicians and entrepreneurs who are trying to sell us something. The world may be in peril, but those who think about structural problems will get together and devise actually useful solutions. We cannot necessarily create that critical mass, but we can make it more likely. Water the garden and watch the flowers grow.
Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
The authors point out that the old purposes of publishing no longer apply in a world where very few people read physical journals; they say “in the electronic world makes one wonder: what do we need publishers for? What is it that they provide that is so essential to the scientific community that we collectively agree to devote an increasingly large proportion of our universities budgets to them?”
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